’Imagine that you have a bank account which gives you $86,400 every morning when you wake up. Whatever you don’t use up during the day gets taken back. Question: what would you do with the money? Of course, you would spend every dollar on your own pleasure and that of others whom you love.
You would devour every cent from this magical bank, take the opportunity to make everyone around you as happy as you could with it. Maybe you’d even end up giving some of the money away to those who you didn’t know — because you probably couldn’t spend all of it on yourself and those close to you in just one day.
So what am I getting at? Each of us has such a bank — it’s name is time. The horn of plenty, which is constantly pouring out the seconds of your life. Every morning, it credits you 86,400 seconds. Every night it writes off at a lost, whatever of this you failed to invest to a good purpose.
It carries over no balance. It allows no over draft. Each day it opens a new account for you. Each night it burns the remains of the day. If you fail to use the day’s deposits, the loss is yours. And there’s no getting round the bank’s other key rule: it could close your account at any moment without warning; your life can end at any second.
So what are you doing with those 86,400 seconds? You must live in the present, on today’s deposits. Invest it, so as to get from it the utmost in health, happiness, and health. The clock is running. Make the most of today.’ — Marcy Levy, If Only It Were True